In late March, I was playing with the palette generator on coolors.co. A couple of them seemed fairly Sailor Moon-themed, and I saved those palettes with the intention of drawing all the Sailor Senshi using those palettes.

I started with Sailor Moon, of course. This only took 1 hour to complete, likely because I wasn’t thinking about light sources, or shading, or highlights.

Then I moved on to Sailor Chibi Moon & Sailor Mercury. They also took 1 hour.

I still feel like the palette I used for Mercury is too blue.

For Sailor Mars, I decided to do something a little different: no lines! I also used an actual reference for this one.

Somehow, this didn’t end up taking too much longer than the previous three: one and a half hours, instead of one.

For Sailor Jupiter, I went back to lined artwork.

The colors in this particular palette remind me a lot of the colors in old comic books.

For Venus, I actually could not figure out a way to draw her tiara that actually looked good. The solution: have her appear as she was first introduced: as the decoy princess.

That completed the inner senshi. Once I’d finished Venus, I started thinking that I was getting a bit uncreative. Limited palettes are pretty nice, but unless I wanted to draw the outer senshi like I did Mars, there wasn’t any way for me to add shadows or highlights.

As a result, the outer senshi are quite different in style: no limited palette, shadows and highlights, and (rather simple) backgrounds.

Saturn was the first I did in that style, and she turned out a lot better than the others, in my opinion.

I wanted to do something more dramatic with Uranus, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to draw her with her sword or if I wanted to draw her doing an attack. So, naturally, I did both.

I did the sketch for this one on paper (in my sketchbook). My pencil sketches usually turn out to be looser than my digital ones, and I think that helps during the inking stage.

I felt comfortable enough with this one to add highlights to Neptune’s hair. I’m so glad I did – it probably would have turned out to be a bit more boring if I hadn’t done that.

The sketch for Pluto was also done in my sketchbook. I…actually have very little to say about this one. I feel like I didn’t do anything new here.